Mobile is clearly overtaking desktop for user attention. Chat is where users spend a lot of their time or maybe most of their time on their mobile devices. In the meantime, as the contact lists of users become larger and larger or even unmanageable in social networks, users get increasingly worried about privacy and start to move more and more information sharing to chat conversations. As a result, more of the information we care about is now contained in our conversations. An approach to handle conversations in a more intuitive and efficient way is desirable.
Users share a lot of information every day, for example, times, locations, places, people, events, videos. However, most of the information they share is static. Users need to go somewhere else to get more information or complete an action. For example, users are talking about going to a theater to watch a movie, but need to check the website of the theater to book tickets.
Users reply to messages either by typing, which can be especially hard on a touch screen of a mobile device, or by copying and pasting from other places where users find answers. Neither provides a good experience for user reply.
Users lose track of things they share in conversations. The conversations may not be easily searchable, for example, a user may need to scroll up and down from a lot of search results to find a piece of information the user really wants.
Additionally, there is no easy way to gain insights from conversations, to gauge context or sentiment, for example. There is also no information feed from a conversation to a different application.